On 07/19/2013 11:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jul 2013 18:08:43 -0400, Devyn Collier Johnson wrote:
As for the case-insensitive if-statements, most code uses Latin letters.
Making a case-insensitive-international if-statement would be
interesting. I can tackle that later. For now, I only wanted to take
care of Latin letters. I hope to figure something out for all
characters.
As I showed, even for Latin letters, the trick of "if astring.lower() ==
bstring.lower()" doesn't *quite* work, although it can be "close enough"
for some purposes. For example, some languages treat accents as mere
guides to pronunciation, so ö == o, while other languages treat them as
completely different letters. Same with ligatures: in modern English, æ
should be treated as equal to ae, but in Old English, Danish, Norwegian
and Icelandic it is a distinct letter.
Case-insensitive testing may be easier in many non-European languages,
because they don't have cases.
A full solution to the problem of localized string matching requires
expert knowledge for each language, but a 90% solution is pretty simple:
astring.casefold() == bstring.casefold()
or before version 3.3, just use lowercase. It's not a perfect solution,
but it works reasonably well if you don't care about full localization.
Thanks for the tips. I am learning a lot from this mailing list. I hope
my code helped some people though.
Mahalo,
DCJ
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